What

• serverless computation .eg "lambda function"
• create & deploy directly on Cloudflare
• arguably the most accessible serverless platform

Why

• No cold start 🚀
• Cheap & fast 💸
  • 100k free reqs, reset daily
• Aim to get you started & deploy quickly (workers.new)
  • 10-lines-of-code examples
• Perfect deploy platform for SSR apps

Simple yet smartly made api 🎯

• CF worker api is implemented after the standard Service worker api, hence the name "Worker"
• Request routing made easy, just inspect incoming request url/method/.etc like you normally did on browser
  • for AWS you'll have to mess with Route53 to get the right behavior (and eventually got slapped with CORS issues)
• Service worker is a web standard created specifically for intercepting request/response, and has been around for some times
• By implementing CF Worker after Service worker api, Cloudflare made it familiar for JS web devs to easily get used to the api, while avoid re-inventing yet another serverless api like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud functions .etc

Batteries included

• built-in fast KV store with async api
  • in contrast AWS/Google/Azure require you to use their platform services .eg RDS, SQS bla bla with their own setup ceremonies to further complex your setup
• ScheduledEvent, WebSocket, Stream, HTML rewriter, rate limit
• Durable objects: a transactional, key-value storage API

Loved by community

• worktop: fully typed framework for CF worker
• miniflare: fast local env for CF worker
• flareact: Next.js but built for CF worker deployment
• vitedge (which I contributed): Vite app on CF worker
• solid-start/svelte-kit: have target option to deploy on CF worker